I’ve been guiltily purchasing prepackaged hummus from the super market to use in my wraps, and to help fill me up when I just know a salad will evaporate on contact. So, since I am at a point in my life where I am sick and tired of feeling guilty about anything, I decided to look up how to make raw hummus. It turns out that most of the recipes I found were surprisingly simple, and I happened to have (most of) the ingredients on hand.
The first thing I had to do was get my beans soaking. I had read somewhere that the enzymes in beans become dormant when the bean is in dried state, but as you begin to sprout the bean, then it enzyme activity is reignited. So, I soaked 1 cup of garbanzo beans for 8 hours or so in filtered, room temperature water. I then drained the beans well (make sure not too much water remains in the bowl or dish you use for this, your beans will start to stink–I KNOW!) and let them sit for another 8 hours before I rinsed and drained again. I repeated this process until I began to see the little nubs of sprouts start to wiggle their way out of the beans. You can let them sprout as long as you think is best, but at this point I took all my beans and began to make hummus.
Now, here’s the the basic “recipe” I followed:
- 1 cup pre-soaked and sprouted garbanzo beans.
- the juice of 2 lemons, freshly squeezed
- 5 cloves of garlic
- 1/2 red bell pepper, diced
- 1 cup extra virgin olive oil
- 1-2 tsp of sea salt
- 1 carrot, chopped
- about 5 squirts of liquid aminos
Now here’s the beauty of making hummus, the basics are really simple. Anyone with a food processor can do it 1-2-3, but you could grind it by hand. I can’t say if it affects the end result, perhaps it does, but what I did was use a tiny food processor that I have. But basically, I just addedall of the ingredients into my food processor and pulsed until it was pretty darn well processed. The resulting mash did not appear quite as smooth as store bought hummus, and perhaps better equipped food processors could do a better job, but it was pretty well mashed, and for the most part smooth. I had to add dabs of oil, and a little water as well in order to keep the mixture from becoming overly thick in the food processor. Be prepared to do so as you process. I also ended up having to add more oil, hours later, after the hummus had settled. Garbanzos suck up so much moisture it is amazing.
Here’s a pic of the hummus in the food processor:
After I had processed it as smooth as could get it (adding extra oil helped a lot), I put it in plastic containers that I reuse from the supermarket, added some fresh red bell pepper on top for adornment, spiced it with some paprika, cayenne pepper, and black pepper and then put it in the fridge to settle and to let all the flavors mingle and coagulate.
And, after it had sat in the fridge for about 2 hours or so, I took it out and decided to sample it as part of a salad I was making for dinner. The salad was pretty basic: assorted fresh greens cut into strips, grated carrot, chopped red onion, chopped red bell pepper, diced portabello mushroom, 1/2 Florida avacado diced, and of course, the raw hummus.
It was deeeeeeeeeelish! I will continue to tweek the hummus recipe and see if I can make it even better. It was good for a first try, but I would like to improve the creaminess of it. Part of me enjoys having to chew the bits of garbanzo here and there, but I have read that some people use raw tahini sauce to “complete” their hummus. I do believe that in authentic hummus recipes, that sesame seeds are used, and tahini is basically crushed sesame seeds mixed with oil. Next time I will definitely hunt down a small sack of seeds and add it in. As a matter of fact, I will be trying out several different flavoring ideas I already have. Stay tuned!